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The economy weak and the public seething, President Barack Obama is expected to propose $300 billion in tax cuts and federal spending Thursday night to get Americans working again. Republicans offered Tuesday to compromise with him on jobs — but also assailed his plans in advance of his prime-time speech.

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The White House is also considering a tax credit for businesses that hire the unemployed. That could cost about $30 billion. Obama has also called for public works projects, such as school construction. Advocates of that plan have called for spending of $50 billion, but the White House proposal is expected to be smaller.

Personally I'm all for giving companies some type of incentive if they hire unemployed people. After all, if they're not generating any tax revenue and are costing unemployment insurance $$$, isn't it better to get them some kind of employment?

I'm a bit of a skeptic. The tax credit is a nice idea but will more than likely have very little effect. It is expensive to hire a person and keep him working, slicing a couple bucks off that expense in the form of a tax credit will do little in the scheme of things. If the credit is anything like the previous ones it's only be good for about a year or less which makes it less appealing.

The public works projects will do the same thing it did last time. Not much. And once you expand that past roads/bridges to facilities such as schools you also put a greater burden on local government which will have to staff and maintain the facilities. Local government is already having major budget issues.

I hope I'm wrong... but this new stimulus seems to be following the old one, which ran $700-800 billion and kept us at 9.2% unemployment.

Another issue I have with the tax cuts is that many companies scrounged and cut wages so they could keep everyone on staff and not let anyone go. Instead of rewarding the companies that kept people working, we're going to reward the one's who let people go and now want to bring a couple back for tax cuts?

Tax cuts AND more spending? If my wife and I were having trouble making ends meet, how would she react if I said "I've got it! I'll take a new job making less money, and we'll start spending more!"

I don't think she'd go for it.

Instead of trying to force companies to hire people, why don't we find ways to support small to meduim sized businesses? They'll hire when they can, do people right, and kickstart the economy at the local level. Once local economies start to stabalize, state and National won't be far behind.

Certainly we have enough infrastructure problems (roads, bridges, schools, mass transit systems) to put a lot of people to work AND better the country, right? The problem is that after these projects are completed, there has to be more work, or the unemployment numbers go back up.

There are two hidden issues in unemployment:

1. UNDERemployment. A lot of people who are working are doing so for wages that are FAR less than what they need to cover their day to day living expenses. Perry created a lot of jobs in Texas and most of them were minimum wage jobs. I don't know who can live off $7.25 an hour.

2. The Education Factor. As of August 2011, the unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher is only 4.6%. It is 13.3% for people with less than a high school diploma and 9.0% for people with a high school diploma. More educated people are working. This again goes toward the 20+ year trend of fewer and fewer jobs for skilled laborers. Our country has yet to catch up with and accept this reality.

2. The Education Factor. As of August 2011, the unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher is only 4.6%. It is 13.3% for people with less than a high school diploma and 9.0% for people with a high school diploma. More educated people are working. This again goes toward the 20+ year trend of fewer and fewer jobs for skilled laborers. Our country has yet to catch up with and accept this reality.

I completely agree that trivializing the importance of the skilled laborer has hurt our country in a number of ways, some of which have yet to be known. That being said, all those numbers say to me as that as bad as things are, it's still easier to get a job the more education you have. I don't see that as a negative thing in and of itself.

But the death of skilled labor is a horrible thing. It used to be that if a farmers equipment broke, he could call the local welder who'd fix it and take a bag of grain as payment. No computers, no spread sheets, just good people doing good work and making a living, and helping each other when it was needed. It's not glamorous, but its the kind of world I'd like to live in anyways.